


Intelligentsia

by Misaya



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Established Levi/Erwin Smith, Established Relationship, Eventual Levi/Erwin Smith, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Angst, M/M, Past Levi/Erwin Smith, Reincarnation, Robot/Human Relationships, Technology, this was supposed to be a oneshot...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8336716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: Levi is just getting used to his new life without Erwin. He'd known about grief, known about anger, had planned for the rest of a grey existence, but he hadn't planned for Erwin to come walking back into his life again as though he'd never died. -rating and tags subject to change





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Even the Darkness Has Arms - The Barr Brothers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O1weQ3oGAM)

Levi was more surprised than anything, that cold morning in late September, when the policemen came knocking at his door. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, rubbed his upper arms frantically to ward off the frosty chill. The sun was still struggling to heft its bulk over the city skyline, and milky sunlight filtered weakly through the layer of fog that wreathed the tops of the buildings in white. 

"Good morning, officers," Levi mumbled, barely suppressing a yawn as he surreptitiously cast a glance towards his bike, chained illegally to a parking sign in front of his apartment building. It didn't have any tickets taped to the seat, and its tires looked relatively whole and unslashed. "Is there something I can help you with?" 

"Mr. Levi Ackerman, I presume?" Levi nodded in response. "You knew Erwin Smith?" one of the officers asked, frowning. His expression was indiscernible behind his sunglasses. Levi was still waking up, and didn't realize that the officer had referred to Erwin in the past tense until long after he'd already invited them inside for coffee like any good law-abiding citizen might have. 

"Yeah, I do," he murmured, stepping aside to let them in. "I do know him." 

Their footsteps clattered down his hallway, their presences thick and heavy in a way his apartment hadn't felt in months. Levi trailed behind them reluctantly, unsurely, one hand reaching out to trace his fingertips across the wall to keep himself grounded in the sudden unreality of the situation he'd been launched into. His hands were shaking as he poured fragrant coffee grounds into a twist of filter paper, as he poured black coffee steaming into three off-white, chipped mugs, studiously avoiding Erwin's favorite powder blue cup growing cobwebs in the back of his cupboard. He set the plastic containers of powdered creamer and sugar in front of the officers, who had propped their sunglasses up on their heads to study him with piercing gazes. 

The wooden chair made a screeching, scraping sound against the old tiles as he pulled it back to sit down with them. 

"Can I ask what this is concerning?" he wanted to know, his tone braver than he felt. The coffee burnt his tongue, bitter black and acrid. And then, before he could stop himself, "Did something happen to Erwin?" 

The officer on the left cleared his throat, glanced pointedly away. The officer on the right, who looked like the more senior of the two, sighed and pinched at the bridge of his nose as if staving off a migraine. "I regret to inform you that, ah, Mr. Smith was found dead in his residence last night." 

Levi's heart skipped a beat. Burning coffee sloshed over the lip of his mug, scalding the back of his hand, but he hardly noticed the curl of pain. His mind was stuck on the sentence, running it back in reels. 

"What did you say?" he asked, faintly, though he was quite sure he hadn't misheard. The city was starting to wake up outside his apartment window, the honks and grumbles of early morning traffic filtering through the smudged glass. 

The world was still going, one inexorable tick after another, and Levi was frozen in place. 

The officer, to his credit, looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Mr. Smith was found dead in his residence last night," he said, crisply, a frown notched between his eyebrows.

"But how?" Levi asked, staring hard at a crack in the stucco on the ceiling, as though he were waiting for it to widen, waiting for the people and furniture upstairs in 14B to come crashing down on all of them. "He was...he was only twenty-nine." 

"Natural causes," the officer on the left chimed in now, his voice scratchy and reedy. He was far too thin to lend his uniform any credit, his Adam's apple bobbing frantically in the skinny column of his throat. 

"What the fuck does that mean?" Levi muttered, his lips moving numbly, the expletive escaping him before he had a chance to pull it back. Then, anger, burning white hot like the reddening skin on the back of his hand. "What the fuck does that mean?"   
  
"Calm down, Mr. Ackerman," the officer on the right said sternly, firmly. The note of authority he'd injected into his voice reeled Levi back in frantically from whatever edge he'd been about to fall over, and he took deep breaths through his nose, trying to force himself to listen. "Before we get into any details, we need to know the nature of your relationship with Mr. Smith. You were listed as last of kin on several of his documents, so we just find the whole situation a bit surprising. To say the least." 

Levi's hands curled slowly into fists, sending ripples through the black liquid in his mug, and he forced himself to uncurl his fingers from their tight strain. 

"We're." He cleared his throat, trying to force the words out. "We were partners. Romantically," he clarified. "But we were taking a break." 

"Did you take breaks often?" the officer wanted to know, though his eyes kept glancing idly around the kitchen as though he already knew the answers. He was probably noting down every deficiency of Levi's, and even though Levi knew he wasn't under investigation for anything suspicious, it still set him on his guard. The empty wine bottle in the corner, drunk last night without even a glass while he was flipping through photo albums and trying not to cry; the pile of unwashed dishes on the counter, uncharacteristic even for him; the empty Styrofoam containers of takeout overflowing from a paper bag on the floor next to his trashcan. 

"No," Levi blurted out. "Well, sometimes," he muttered, when the officer quirked a brow at him. Bastard. "He needed time to work on his projects, and I needed time by myself. So we'd take breaks for a few months, then get back together. It was like he was on a business trip abroad or something. We were in the middle of one just now." 

"And how long ago did this particular break start?" 

Levi frowned, drumming his fingers impatiently on the tabletop as his mind, wakened by the caffeine, began to jitter stray thoughts. Erwin's smile; Erwin putting on a pair of wire-framed glasses that magnified his bright blue eyes; Erwin's hands sketching his machines on graph paper until they covered the walls with ink. 

"A few months ago," he murmured, blinking. "It was still summer. July, probably." 

"July," the officer repeated. Levi had the odd feeling that he was judging him. "Were the two of you in the habit of communicating frequently with each other when you were, ah, apart?" 

"Sometimes," Levi shrugged. "We were apart, like you said. Taking a break. So we didn't text or call or email each other very much sometimes, but sometimes we did. This past break wasn't one of those times." 

"Did the two of you part on amicable terms? Was he acting odd, or anything?" 

"I guess?" Levi was getting frustrated now, the insistent curiosity piercing through the crackly veneer he'd managed to erect over his soul, threatening to let the grief and anger and bewilderment rushing through like an arctic wind. "We hadn't had any quarrels or anything like that, he'd just wanted some time off." 

"Right. I see." The officer stared down at his folded hands; the one on the left wouldn't meet Levi's searching gaze. "That would explain it, then, I suppose."

"Explain what?" Levi snapped, his teeth grinding rough together in his jaw. He was this short of standing up and screaming. "Explain what, exactly? Healthy twenty-nine-year-olds don't just up and die for no reason!"

The officer finally looked up, met Levi's eye squarely. "A posthumous blood test indicated lead poisoning."

A moment of disconnect. "Lead poisoning?" Levi asked, his anger flooding away as suddenly as it had come, leaving him chilled to the bone without any ire to keep him warm. "Are you sure?" 

"Quite sure," the officer replied. He seemed reluctant to continue, but Levi pressed forward. 

"It wasn't like he was a welder, or a blacksmith, or anything like that," Levi said, exasperated. "Hell, he always used one of those tap water filters, the ones specially designed to remove metals and shit like that. How the fuck did this happen?" 

"Well, lead takes a while to build up in one's system," the officer on the left hedged. Levi glared at him, and he shut up almost immediately. 

"It's impossible to say," the older officer said, sighing. A heavy silence fell over them, and Levi had the urge to go back to bed, to burrow himself into his cotton sheets and sleep forever. 

As though they sensed this, the impending storm, the officers got heavily to their feet, mumbled consolations that Levi barely heard, and invited him to go look through Erwin's personal effects whenever he felt comfortable. The apartment had apparently been paid through until the end of the lease period the next March, and the landlord had been kind enough to agree to keep it vacant. 

Levi escorted them out of his apartment. The world outside looked glossy, the officers' shadows shimmering on the sidewalk as they walked down the concrete stairs, and Levi barely had time to shut the door behind him before he was sinking to the floor, burying his head in the cradle of his arms, tears racing down his face. 

* * *

He woke up sometime in the late afternoon, his bones aching from the floor and his eyes sore from the tears that had dried salty on his lips. The world had subtly shifted, one degree, one fraction, and Levi felt as though he'd had his heart ripped out of him.

Erwin? Gone? No. Surely that couldn't be. 

But there was the evidence, three cold cups of coffee on his kitchen table and the burn on the back of his hand, the incontrovertible proof that this morning hadn't been a fever dream. He wished it had been. 

He poured the coffee down the sink, watched the black swirl down the drain. The pile of dishes dwindled quickly as he scrubbed them desolately before loading them into the dishwasher. The paper bag of takeout rustled in his hands as he carried it out to the trash bins back behind the apartment building. He tilted the empty wine bottle back, his eyes frantically searching for any stray drops, and then, when he couldn't find any, the anger flung the bottle across the room to smash into deep green shards against the opposite wall.

* * *

 

The hours before were lost to him, an endless blurry spot on his memory. He vaguely recalled the wheels of his bicycle bumping frantically over the cracked pavement to the garish neon lights of the convenience store on the corner, the look of disgust on the cashier's face as she scanned through bottle after bottle. Probably she'd thought he was one of those alkies. Levi's brain felt too small for his skull, a screaming pain lodged deep in his head, and his stomach churned violently as he rolled over in bed to glance at the glaring red digital numbers of his alarm clock on the nightstand. His mouth felt fuzzy, his tongue too thick.

4:03 AM. 

Levi groaned, the taste of old cheap wine stale in his throat. As his eyes grew adjusted to the darkness, he could just barely make out the silhouettes of several bottles of wine littered on the bedroom floor. He hoped that they were empty, then hoped that he hadn't drunk them all. Maybe this was a sign of a deeper rooted problem. Maybe Erwin would know what to do. 

The darkness was insistent, and it pulled Levi back into its unrelenting embrace. _Would have known_ , a nagging voice whispered in his ear, but he ignored it. Wine always made his head go funny. He closed his eyes again, and drifted away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Ghost on the Shore - Lord Huron](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QthMaFm6-g)

The fall seemed to rush right by him in a haze of drunken nights and hungover mornings. The man in the mirror looked foggy, his eyes bloodshot and terrified, his skin sallow under the buzzing fluorescent lights. Levi no longer recognized himself, and the thought of losing himself, too, was almost enough to shock him into sobriety. Almost, but not quite. Leaves fluttered down the sidewalk and clogged the gutters with their brittle bodies. 

The thought of Erwin's apartment, all his stuff still locked away exactly as he'd left it, kept Levi far away from that part of the city. Hell, he'd barely managed to scrape himself together enough to go to the funeral, hiding his eyes behind a pair of aviator sunglasses and hiding the sour scent of wine on his breath with Listerine. Erwin looked so polished, peaceful, pristine, lying with his arms folded inside the plain oak coffin, and the funeral home smelt cloying, sweet flowers gone to rot. It had taken all of his willpower not to gag as he leaned over the edge of the casket to press a dry kiss to Erwin's cheek. Waxy, tasting vaguely chalky like the foundation the mortician had applied to cover the grey pallor that was already starting to sink in around the edges. 

He vaguely remembered Erwin's parents, too, looking as shell-shocked and numb as he felt, and he almost wished they would blame him. Almost wished they would shout at him for not having the presence of mind to realize their son was wasting away. It might have been easier to accept than their pity. 

Lead poisoning. The words reverberated around his head in a series of endless echoes, shouting so loud that Levi sometimes still heard them through his fevered stupors. Lead poisoning. But how could that be? There must have been something more to it, he felt. Maybe the posthumous medical examination results had been screwy, a technical error or something. 

Lead poisoning wasn't nearly enough to answer all the questions and unfinished affairs Erwin had no doubt left behind in the vacuum of his wake, but Levi wasn't about to demand they drag him up and do a full-scale autopsy. He was sure his mental state wasn't strong enough to handle that particular ordeal, and was only too aware that his stability was slipping down the drain with every passing day. 

He was drinking far too much, and he was only too aware of the fact. Wine bottles piled up in the corners of his apartment, clinked and clanked in brown paper bags that he furtively squirreled away underneath the panel of a too-large coat. The sound of a cork popping out of a glass neck was almost enough to make him forget his loneliness; the whisper of liquid burbling into the belly of a glass almost enough to make him breathe easy again. It seemed he could barely fall asleep without his head spinning and the thick bitter taste of tannins heavy on his tongue. 

It was Erwin's birthday when Levi visited his grave for the first time. The dirt was cool and damp beneath his fingertips as he lowered himself heavily to the ground. Someone, probably his parents or some well-meaning colleague from the university Erwin had TA'd at, had already left flowers, stuffed like an afterthought into the holder by the marble tombstone. It had rained recently, and Levi could almost see his reflection in the shiny surface, distorted by the etched letters meant to encompass all of Erwin's being. 

They weren't enough. They weren't nearly enough. There weren't enough words to describe him, and Levi felt a knot growing in the hollow of his throat as he tried to think past the memories. 

A beloved son. There was no mention of Levi, of the life they had and might have had.

It was probably for the better, Levi rationalized with a sigh of regret as he dug into the pocket of his military jacket to pluck out a packet of cigarettes. The first buzz of nicotine and the sharp, soothing burn of smoke in his lungs set his pounding heart to rest, and he took a deep inhale, held it, blew tendrils of grey to wreathe around his face and hands. 

"I know, you always hated it when I smoked," he began, almost conversationally, turned slightly away from the headstone so he wouldn't feel too pathetic. Like this, he could pretend that Erwin was right there, just a little bit out of the corner of his eye, just a little bit out of reach. "But to be fair, it's my first in a few months." He puffed meditatively, watching the cars shoot in gleaming dashes down the oak-lined avenue in front of the cemetery. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed, a horn blared. The wind whistled through the stones, and Levi tugged his coat tighter around himself to ward off the chill. 

"You were always a real piece of work, you know that?" he asked, his hand shaking as he drew in another breath of smoke to try and thaw the freeze inside him. "Messy. Unorganized. Habitually tardy." 

The front gates to the cemetery creaked open with a rusty squeal, and Levi looked up. A little girl and her mother, dressed in matching red coats and black hats, were picking their way through the stones. The girl was carrying a small flock of brightly colored balloons, and the sight made Levi's throat clutch tight. The mother shot him a gently admonishing look, probably for smoking, and it was only until they'd made their way to a grave a few hundred feet away and he'd crushed the cigarette out into the moist dirt that Levi was able to breathe easy again.

The tears came on the next sigh. 

"You fucker," he snapped, trying to be quiet and failing miserably. Luckily, the mother and daughter either weren't paying attention or had elected not to hear. He reached up to scrub at his face with the cuff of his sleeve. "You absolute fucker! It should've been me. I was supposed to end it. I was supposed to break up with you. Not...not whatever the fuck this is." 

Erwin didn't reply, and there wasn't a single sign that he'd heard, wherever he was. Levi took a few ragged breaths to calm himself down. It wasn't working.

"Well," he muttered finally, standing up and clearing his throat, brushing loose particles of soil off the seat of his pants. "You're thirty now. Or you would have been, if you hadn't gone and gotten lead fucking poisoning. Who the fuck even gets that in this day and age, unless the city's been tampering with the water? Always told you to drink bottled, you idiot. But you never listen, though I guess that doesn't matter now. You being dead and all, you won't ever have to listen to me again." 

Another deep breath. This wasn't working, wasn't turning out quite how Levi had envisioned it would. He stuffed his hands deep into his coat pockets, pursed his mouth in thought. 

"Well. Happy birthday then, I guess." Almost as an afterthought, he added, "And I miss you. I've never been too good with emotional displays, so I guess I'll just leave it at that. I'll see you next time." 

The sky was grey and overcast, thick with threatening clouds. Levi turned to look back over his shoulder as he made his way out of the cemetery, as if to convince himself that Erwin's grave still remained with its freshly dug soil and its gleaming new headstone, to reassure himself that it hadn't been just a product of a deluded imagination being exposed to the sobering light of day for the first time in a while. 

The little girl and her mother were two red stripes in the dreary scene, and even as Levi watched, the girl stood up and let her balloons go, pricks of blue and green and yellow floating through the grey.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Conrad - Ben Howard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYR6A47DK-Q)

Right. There was nothing for it. Levi frowned at the backs of his hands, tried to think of another reason why he might not be able to stop by Erwin's apartment to sort through his things. Failed. 

The last of Erwin's possessions were probably gathering dust and cobwebs. Levi knew how Erwin lived, and he shuddered at the image his mind supplied him with. Piles of papers would be strewn haphazardly all over Erwin's desk, and the plastic husks of empty ballpoint pens would be littered throughout the flat in the most unlikely places: under the couch, in the vegetable crisper, in his toothbrush cup. 

Levi gritted his teeth and pinched at the bridge of his nose, trying to stave off the impending migraine he could feel starting to build up behind his eyes. 

"Levi? Are you alright?" His mother's tinny voice buzzed into his ear, and he sighed, pressed his phone closer to his ear. 

"I'm fine, Mom," he replied, his eyes wandering over the evidence of how not-fine he was. Half a finger of scotch winked up at him from the bottom of a crystal tumbler he'd found in the back of a cupboard, growing dust and cobwebs, and he'd wrinkled his nose at it, wondering why he had it until he remembered that Erwin liked Glenfiddich. "Just...it's a bit hard, you know." He took another thick swallow of scotch, tears pooling in his eyes at the burn in his throat. 

"Of course it is, dear," his mother murmured in his ear, her voice buzzing tinnily over the telephone wires. Levi wanted, more than anything, for her to be there, to hold him and hug him and reassure him that things were somehow going to be alright. "One day a a time, alright? And never hesitate to call me, no matter what time it is." 

"Okay, I will," Levi agreed, swallowing thickly. His tears were starting to clog his throat, and he hung up quickly before his mother could say anything else. It had already been months, longer even, if one counted the time they'd been apart, and Levi still found himself waking up every morning and expecting Erwin to be there. 

He took a shuddery breath, swiping the back of his hand furiously over his cheeks and eyes. The rest of the scotch burned his mouth and throat as he swallowed it back in one fierce gulp, to try and burn out the frost inside him. Then, though he knew he shouldn't have, and though he knew he was toeing a fine line between maintaining his sanity and rampant alcoholism, he ignored the warning voice in the back of his mind and poured a healthy slug of scotch into the miniature thermos he normally used for tea and shoved it into his coat pocket.

* * *

 

With the scotch warming him from the inside out, Levi tugged on a coat, shoved his key ring into his pocket, and headed out into the crisp November afternoon. The wind was freezing, and he shivered as he tugged the lapels tighter around himself and stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. The last of the year's dead leaves skittered eagerly along the ground, and slush was forming in the street gutters. The branches of the trees waved black and bleak against the grey sky, and Levi wondered when it would start to snow. His breath frothed from his mouth in a silver stream, and he wished that he'd worn a scarf. 

His fingers were near frozen as he traipsed up the concrete stairs to Erwin's front door, fumbling for the key ring in his pocket. The metal jingled as he tugged it out, picking through the keys for Erwin's, and he shoved it unceremoniously into the lock, jiggling it when it refused to turn. 

He had half a second of believing that perhaps the door would just refuse him entry, that he'd be forced to come back another day when the lock was thawed out and working properly again, but he'd always been a magnet for poor luck, and the lock slid through just as he was about to leave. 

Levi swallowed roughly, and stepped inside.

* * *

 

It was just as cold inside as it had been outside in the grey day, and Levi hastened to stuff the key ring back into his pocket and breathe warm air over his hands. Frost traced patterns on the glass panes in the door, and months' worth of useless mail had piled up on Erwin's welcoming mat just inside the door. Levi kicked the envelopes to the side, making a mental note to possibly go through them later and see if any of them had interesting contents. Maybe there would be something to explain the lead poisoning. A superficial glance over the return addresses offered no clue. 

The wooden floors creaked underneath his heavy boot steps, and he squinted in the dimness. The apartment felt much too empty, even though he knew that none of Erwin's things had been touched. He let his fingers trace absentmindedly over the wall as he walked carefully down the hallway to the kitchen. The photographs Erwin had hung were painful to look at, and he pointedly avoided the fixed smiles of his happier moments. 

The kitchen was coated with a fine layer of dust. True to form, the fridge had been disconnected and emptied, the utilities turned off. Some well meaning soul, perhaps Erwin's mother or landlord or friendly neighbor, had cleaned whatever dishes had been in the sink and put them away. 

Levi wondered where they'd found him. Had it been here? he asked himself, collapsed in front of his sink with a glass of water half drunk on the counter tiles? Had it been in the hallway, surrounded by pictures of a better time? The thought made him queasy, a little nauseous, the scotch starting to rebel in his stomach. 

"Erwin," he murmured, breaking the silence. He half expected the name to echo around the empty apartment, but the only other noises he heard came from his breathing and the sounds of cars on the street outside. "Erwin," he repeated, wondering if he'd ever have the occasion to say the name again. 

Well. There was nothing for it except to start, really, and Levi sighed shuddery to himself as he tugged up his sleeves and headed for the study. There was no time like the present.

* * *

 

To say it was a mess would have been an understatement. Levi gawked at the sheer scale of the project that stared back at him from Erwin's desk and bulging file cabinets. His computer was silent and black on his desk, and spare parts and cartridges and wires lay haphazardly everywhere. He heard a crunch from under his boot, and looked down to find that he'd crushed some small machine or another, and its broken pieces glittered up at him forlornly from where it had shattered on the wood. 

The air was thick with the smell of old ink and heaps of paper, and Levi could feel claustrophobia setting in. 

How could Erwin live like this? He wanted to shriek, wanted to kick aside piles of paper until they went flying through the air like snow, wanted to do something drastic. His fingers fiddled with a lighter in his other coat pocket. It felt too light, was probably empty. But just one spark would do it, he thought bitterly to himself, one spark and the whole thing could go up in flames and it would be like Erwin had never existed. 

A few moments passed. Cars honked outside. Somewhere, a siren squealed. The blinds had been left open, presumably ever since Erwin had died, and the milky grey light made the room feel colder than it was. 

Levi calmed himself as best he could, forcing his breathing to slow. Alright. He could see the floor at least, he thought with a rueful smile. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. He wished he'd started cleaning earlier; this type of thing would take months at the very least to sort out and organize, and Levi was willing to bet there were still some valuable documents buried among the piles. Patents, perhaps. What was left of erwin's lessons and thesis, at the very least. 

And, Levi thought, feeling a sort of numb panic as tears started to well in his eyes again, maybe he'd find that Erwin had loved him more than he'd let on, that maybe Erwin had loved him more than Levi had let him. 

Levi's frozen fingers nudged against the metal thermos he'd stuffed into his pocket earlier, and, ignoring the way his hands were trembling, he tugged it out and screwed it open. He took a deep swallow of it, closing his eyes tight against the liquid fire burning its way down his throat and pooling in the pit of his belly. 

It took more self control than he was willing to admit to force his clutching hand to set down the thermos on what seemed like the only bare patch on the study's side table. 

He huffed a sigh, his breath puffing into a dim cloud, and cleared off the litter from Erwin's chair, which squeaked horrendously as he sat down. Levi pulled the first pile of papers towards him with a steely determination that had somehow kept him at the minimum of function for the past few months, and began to sort through them. 

There were half-completed forms outlining the patent application steps that Erwin had doodled over with loose ideas and practice runs of his signature. Levi traced the words absentmindedly with the tip of one finger as he took another sip of scotch. He could feel the indents in the paper, but could no longer feel the burn in the back of his throat. 

There were printouts of what looked like tentative revisions to Erwin's thesis, and Levi skimmed through the pages, reading the words without understanding. It was too cerebral for him, but he sorted the papers into a separate file, thinking he'd hand them over to the university later, see if they could make any use of it. He was sure they would be able to. Erwin was, and always had been, some strange sort of brilliant. 

Oh. Here. 

Levi's throat tightened at the wrinkled receipt in front of him. 

The ink had faded, and it was barely legible, but the store's watermark at the top was still readable. It was from a small, independently-run jewelry store near the university that specialized in wedding and engagement rings. He vaguely remembered Erwin saying something about popping over for a visit, and, oh, what had he said? He screwed up his face, trying to think as the room started to undulate in slow circles around him. He'd probably said something snarky, something sassy, something biting and bitter even as he'd hoped Erwin might ask him if they could possibly get married. 

Here was the receipt now, crumpled and wrinkled and stuffed away under an application for something that looked a bit like a plan for a sentient refrigerator, and Levi smoothed it out tenderly on the desk, crying quietly and spattering the forms with drops. 

The apartment creaked around him, and Levi drank to forget as he slowly sorted the papers into important and not, and was so absorbed in his work that he failed to notice the gentle clicking of the study door swinging closed behind him. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tin Lover - The Paper Kites](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnrrFc8BI4Q)

The room was spinning wildly around him, and Levi blinked slowly, his vision swimming with dark spots. Outside the window, cars floated past in streams of red neon. The streetlights glowed orange pools on the sidewalk, and his head was starting to ache. His mouth felt fuzzy, his tongue thick and glued, his lips chapped. The desk in front of him looked only slightly less messy than it had been before, and he stifled a groan of dismay at how much paperwork there was still left to sort through. 

He sighed, stretching and wincing at the crick in his neck that had developed from his awkward position in Erwin's supposedly ergonomic swivel desk chair. A slight feeling of hunger gnawed at the pit of his stomach, but he brushed it aside. The metal thermos he'd set aside felt discouragingly empty when he nudged against it with a finger. 

"Fuck," he muttered, his mouth lingering on the f, his lip drawn lightly between his upper teeth. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." 

He was drinking far too much for his own good, and he was bitterly aware of the fact. Erwin would have been concerned, would have urged him to try and cut back and, if he'd thought things were spiraling too quickly out of his control, probably would have begged him to attend AA meetings or see a therapist or something. He would have cared, would have been so fucking nice and sweet about the whole thing when all Levi really wanted was to wallow in self-pity at the bottom of a bottle.

Levi cautiously stood up, bracing the heels of his hands against the edge of the desk. The room tilted wildly around him, and he staggered forward. The edge of the desk dug painfully into his abdomen, and he grunted an expletive as he tried to reposition himself with one hand, the fingers of his other scrabbling for the desk lamp switch in the corner. 

It clicked on, and he had to close his eyes against the blinding glare that cast his fingers and the piles of paperwork into sharp relief. He could feel tears budding beneath his eyelids, and could see the pale red networks of blood vessels coursing hotly against his pupils. 

All this would just have to wait, Levi thought to himself tiredly, rubbing at his eyes with his knuckles and groaning tiredly. The papers and the mess and all of Erwin's plans. It would have to wait until the sobering light of morning, when Levi could think a little more clearly. 

He clicked the desk light off again, the room falling back into cool and calming shadow, and stumbled for the door, his fingers slipping over the knob. Levi didn't remember closing it, but perhaps it had been a draft in the building, an open window somewhere else in the flat. It would be dealt with tomorrow, he half-promised to himself as he slipped into the hallway, keeping one hand pressed flat against the bare wall for purchase. 

He made his way to Erwin's bedroom, marching along through pure muscle memory, and wriggled clumsily out of his jeans before crawling into the unmade sheets and burying his face in Erwin's pillow. It smelled musty, old and disused and somehow blank, but he thought that maybe he could detect just the faintest hint of Erwin's aftershave on the cotton casing. Slightly spicy, slightly sweet, the scent of longing. Levi sighed wistfully, heavily, his breath catching and stuttering in his throat on its way out, and drifted off to a dreamless sleep. 

* * *

 

The morning came with a pounding headache that felt as though it were threatening to squeeze his eyeballs from their sockets, and Levi buried his head in the wrinkled sheets, groaning and trying to take deep, calming breaths through his mouth. There was some sort of food vendor that had set up on the corner of the intersection outside, and the sharp scents of salt and spices that Levi couldn't name at the present moment invaded his nostrils and set his stomach to churning. 

His bladder screamed at him, full to bursting, and he reluctantly stumbled out of bed, groping his way blindly to the bathroom, feeling the bright morning sunlight piercing through his eyelids. He sorely hoped that Erwin would still have a roll of toilet paper on the holder; he hadn't bothered to check, and he'd already plopped himself on the cold ceramic seat. 

He wanted water, desperately. He wanted a cigarette. He wanted a drink, and this was perhaps the most concerning part of all. 

"Why'd you have to go and leave me alone?" he wondered, aloud, his elbows pressing red patches of pressure into his thighs as he opened his eyes a crack and stared at the dark blue towels still hanging on their metal rod on the opposite wall. Erwin had always been the introspective one, the one who'd always dared to ask Why? instead of How? Levi could hardly remember what it was like to miss the methods, but he supposed he'd have to learn again. 

The towels themselves were dusty with disuse, but Levi shook them out anyway before reaching behind him to flush the toilet and maneuvering himself into the shower. The water spurted reluctantly chilly from the tap, and Levi felt himself waken quickly, his skin pebbling from the cold. There was still shampoo in the plastic bottle in the wire rack, and Levi lathered it into his hair quickly, filling the shower stall with the fragrance of love gone past. It would take hours for the scent to wear off, maybe days if Levi kept very still, curled up in Erwin's bed in an old sweatshirt, hardly daring to move. 

"We've got to move on," he muttered to himself, shivering under the spray; it refused to warm up, and he rinsed the suds from his hair hurriedly, giving himself a halfhearted scrub with the soap before rinsing that off, too. "We've got to get past this whole mess of shit." 

Who we was wasn't quite clear in his mind, but it made him feel a little less alone as he stepped out of the shower, water puddling on the tile as he wrapped one of Erwin's old towels around himself. He kept waiting for the sound of Erwin's key in the lock, kept waiting to hear Erwin's snores from the bedroom, kept waiting for something that might make it feel like the apartment wasn't just frozen in time. 

Cars honked in the intersection outside. The food vendor was shouting something that Levi couldn't quite make out. It was a surreal morning in a series of surreal events, and Levi pinched at his bare thigh very hard to convince himself he wasn't just dreaming again. His fingers left a pinch of red, a dark flare of pain in his flesh. 

* * *

 

His footsteps were slightly more steady as he wandered back to the bedroom and allowed the towel to puddle to the floor along with his discarded jeans from the night before as he crawled back into the rumpled sheets. He took the glass of water on the nightstand, lifting it to his lips and sipping gratefully as he thanked his drunken self from the night before for what surely must have been generous foresight. 

Erwin had been reading Cloud Atlas before he'd died, if the paperback on his nightstand was any indication. A plastic bookmark had been inserted somewhere roughly halfway through the novel. It was a small thing, an insignificant thing, really, but Levi felt another raw shock of pain pierce his heart as he considered the fact that Erwin had never gotten the chance to finish the story, and would never know how it ended. 

He'd never read it, himself. He'd always been too busy, too angry, too anxious, too something. There was nothing left now but time, really, time to think and time to mourn and time to wonder if perhaps there was anything else he might have done. 

They'd had minutes and hours and days and weeks to love, or to learn how to, and he'd never really bothered to try. 

He set the empty glass tenderly on the nightstand and reached for the book, leaving Erwin's bookmark lodged firmly in place as he turned gently to the first page. 

**Author's Note:**

> you can come and bother me about this on misayawriting.tumblr.com 
> 
> Also, I know my writing style has changed! Let me know what you think about it :)


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